Everything you're hearing about Israeli interdiction of the Turkish flotilla is probably wrong. First, this is not a humanitarian flotilla to bring humanitarian goods, food, water to the Gaza Strip. Remember, the Gaza Strip has plenty of food, water, and other supplies. The marketplaces have all kinds of produce, which have been photographed. Le Monde carried an article about Gaza On October 10, 2009 saying that "the shelves in the marketplaces are full." This is not about humanitarian aid.

Second, the people on these boats were not peace activists singing "We Shall Overcome". In particular, the boat called The Marmera, the sixth boat, where there was a major incident between our naval commandos and the people on board, the people there are members of an organization called IHH, which is a Turkish organization that is supportive of terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Hamas. The French magistrate, Jean-Louis Brougiere, in fact gave testimony that IHH was involved in the "millennium plot" to bomb the Los Angeles airport in late 1999.They are radical Islamists.

Third, Israel has a naval blockade around Gaza to keep out Iranian weapons, and the Iranian rockets that have been used against Israeli citizens. It is completely legal. It is Israel's right to board any ship trying to run that blockade. That's all the Israeli naval commandos wanted to do. If the passengers were humanitarian workers, they would have let them see that there's nothing on the boat, and they would have gone on. But instead, they decided to attack our soldiers, and we defended ourselves.

There are many precedents for what Israel has done. The US put a "quarantine" around Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, because it didn't want Soviet missiles in 1962 to get to be deployed there and aimed at the United States. In December 2002, Spanish commandos boarded a North Korean ship, the Sosun, in international waters, looking for weapons of mass destruction. The French boarded hundreds of ships in the 1950's during the Algerian conflict. The Europeans know international law from their own experience.

Today Israel is blockading Hamas, the Hamas entity in Gaza. Hamas is an international terrorist organization. It's defined as such by the United States, European Union, Canada. They rule the Gaza Strip. They are trying to import weapons from Iran so they can launch rockets against the citizens of Israel. If Israel opened up Gaza and just let ships come in, it will end up with hundreds of rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. Israel has a right to defend itself, and it expects that the countries of the world would respect that.

Yet now there is talk of an international investigation of what Israel did. If anybody should be investigated it should be Turkey. Turkey was supposed to be a NATO ally. It is fair to ask why is its prime minister, Mr. Erdogan, supporting an organization like the IHH that is directly tied to international terrorism. Erdogan, has now pulled Turkey from a pro-Western orientation to becoming an ally of the Iranians. As a result, it's become more hostile to America, it's become more hostile to Israel, and the Europeans don't want to talk about it, but they're also very nervous.